The Gazebo By The Lakes

I watched you, watch me from a distance. I watched your eyes track my every movement from across a room full of humans that could never feel all that we felt. A cosmic connection, two celestial bodies colliding. Our beginning was inked in blue flame and coated in stardust. As I skimmed our cursed ending, it spelled the fate of a sun.

When first birthed into each other's orbit we were simply battered babies. Bubbling with innocence and light, while still ignorant enough to the scars which would soon riddle our already reddened bodies, that they would not yet shadow our becoming. Driven by urges we didn’t fully understand, we sought freedom full throttle. In the throes of youth we remained two hands that barely brushed, and two faces ever flushed when caught in the sights of the other. In the strain of maturity, once stifled by an inkling of wavering wills, we wandered off to face The Fetter. Estranged for ages , growing into our pains…Until a turn of fate led me to you, and you to I. Once upon a stray night, we met again.

Miguel and I had our first date on a Friday in August. We met for dinner with friends of mine and we filled our bellies with mirth as he told jokes. Good ones. Laughing about the food, the group, and our strange circumstances, a crucial camaraderie formed between us.

Beneath timid lashes, we made eyes at each other, pushing an invisible boundary to break; touching our tentative limbs tauntingly underneath the table. I helped him pick out what to eat from the buffet when he couldn’t choose; he drank my drink and ate my ice cream, but paid for it all before I could. Good man. And when my best friend asked who would be taking me home after dinner, he didn’t turn to me. Instead, only looked across the table at Jenna and said, “I’ll take care of her”. That was news to me. Good news. And when we were all finished, he did just that.

I gave out hugs and “see you later’s” to my closest companions, he did the same to what to him were near strangers. They offered up “goodbyes” and “be safe’s” where I knew there wasn’t any danger to be had. Just us, I was prepared to go to his car, but instead he walked me to the gazebo across the way from the restaurant. I thought, now what are we gonna do here? A lot, it turned out. More than I’d ever imagined.

We talked about everything and nothing, and we laughed like school kids- all teeth and carelessness. We tip-toed next to uncharted terrain: our feelings and our hangups, what life offered up but did not give us, and all the heartfelt conditions laid out before us we could not help but pick up and weigh. Pondering if perhaps, one day, the world may take them back.

He pulled me close to his chest and looked into my eyes like he was searching for something only one of us had always known was hidden there. And the veil over the others eyes had just vanished before them both.

We kissed in the gazebo by the lakes in the pitch of noire with the night around us. We danced, closer than we’d ever been before. Swaying in rhythm to the ripples of water and the rustle of leaves flagged by the wind. He called me a good kisser, and I said the same. He held my name on his lips and my face in his hands when he told me he would forever remember his “…first kiss with Raven, in the gazebo by the lakes…”

We could feel Florida’s caress on our skin. The air moved and breathed down our necks, weighted by the water suspended in its embrace. Our clothes stuck to us, touched by the humid heat while the threat of some friend or foe lingered in the periphery. A gator, or its ghost, drove us away from that gazebo by the lakes. And that night, its new meaning took shape.

Our journey did not end there though. He had plans to leave his lonely behind and I was a willing companion, an eager passenger. We talked on the drive about cars, and his shoes, and his love of crocs. He said “this is the empty parking garaged im gonna take you to. Wait… that sounded creepier than I expected.” I thought he was joking.. he wasn’t . So I said “this is the part where you kidnap me then huh”, he laughed but did not reply, and I went anyway. A serious case of Stockholm in the making, but what was a gregarious girl to do? I felt besotted. I felt at home in his presence. A lingering like- wailing- to- like. A cry heard across generations.

We didn’t make it into the parking garage that night. There were locked metal doors, and concrete walls, and I was wearing a dress. I almost said fuck it, I’ll climb it, he did after all. But as he sat atop the wall looking into me he edged, “why don’t we rain check for another night?” And we left together then, a flock of falling feathers. He helped me into his car, holding my hand and moving the skirts of my dress. He handed me back my bag and we stared at each other for moments longer... Knowing this was the start, and the end of something. It turned out to be an entirely different beast we faced in the end of the beginning. A phantom of what lurked at the gazebo by the lakes.

I watched you watch me from a proximity I had never let any other venture before. Watch me in sweat, and in sleep, and through passion, and amidst grief. I allowed "I love you’s” to pass my lips freely and fought for control to slip through my grip. I let you love me up close for the first time. And you ensured it was our last every chance you’d get.

I watched your eyes track every movement of another whose body was not mine, whose skin did not hold your imprint, and whose lips did not taste your lies. A room full of humans who could not ever feel the way that I felt. A conscious break, two souls quelling an eternal flame. I saw your hand scratch out the delicate etchings of our story with every rough fist made around a fantasy that did not include just you and me. Jerking at everything sacred until it ripped at the seams. The sun had burst. For that is the fate of a star; it is dead upon sight. Falling well before you ever catch its eye.

I grew up fast in the many moons following the crash of you. I picked up shattered edges of a heart stained glass and I drug them along the scar tissue. I reopened wounds and let them bleed a trail which led me back to the girl I knew before you’d spooked her. I saw a reflection in the lakes and I met a phantom attending their own wake. Unrecognizable and familiar in the same vein. Two strangers Akin to fate. Though I knew my story would not end the same as the warped willows before me. So I settled into my shame, I nursed and cradled until I outgrew the aches. Encased in a dance with destiny, I twirled, and twirled, and twirled until a beat pulsed in my chest, sparked by the rhythm in my feet. And I was led straight back to me.

I returned to the gazebo one day. All newness had gone in a fade and its wood weeped. Worn and old, vacant and greedy. A crater, a playa, a cemetery… full of gators and ghosts to feed.

Here lies The Gazebo by the Lakes; a glutton for punishment, I lay fresh flowers at its grave.